We’ve covered hundreds of malls on this site, but only a few dozen of them have much of a personal connection. The Serramonte Center Mall in Daly City is one of those, since I currently live only about 4 miles away in San Francisco. I’ve learned a lot about the Bay Area in my 4 […]

The Coachella Valley is a desert region in eastern Riverside County, California, stretching through the desert north of the Salton Sea. One of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country (with an estimated 2010 population of around 600,000 permanent residents, plus hundreds of thousands of seasonal residents), the region has been a popular tourist destination […]

I’ve been meaning to get around to posting Blackhawk Plaza for some time. Blackhawk Plaza is one of the weirdest malls in all of California–an excessively upscale, kind of dead-ish small outdoor mall that’s unfailingly pretty. I really wish all lifestyle centers were this nice, and I hope this place is someday able to find […]

Hayward, California is a large blue collar suburb of 151,000 people in the central East Bay region of California, located about 15 miles south of downtown Oakland. Like much of the Bay Area (and the East Bay in particular), it’s a culturally/racially and economically diverse city, with recent immigrants and long-time residents alike. Historically an […]

Los Angeles is known for its malls in a way almost no other major city is. Its urban built environment is proto-suburban, an odd blend of almost-urban density and car-culture all blended into a stew. So unlike other large cities, where malls feel like something of an afterthought, grafted onto the edges of cities at […]

Fiesta Mall is Indio’s enclosed shopping mall, and one of three enclosed malls in the Coachella Valley. It was built in 1974 as Indio Fashion Mall, and aside from minor cosmetic updates has the same layout as it did then. Sears and San Bernardino-based Harris were the original anchors, and a small single-level mallway connected them with only 225,000 square feet of total space. Indio was a much smaller city then, with a population under 20,000, and had a caucasian-majority demographic.

The Feather River Center is located just southeast of downtown Marysville, in the unincorporated community of Linda. Originally constructed in 1972 to serve the rural Yuba-Sutter metropolitan area an hour north of Sacramento, the 400,000 square foot center was dubbed simply “The Mall” at the time and is to this day the only major retail […]

San Jose is the third largest city in California, and the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, trumping even the region’s more famous namesake city in population. San Jose, however, is a much different kind of city than San Francisco: sprawling and modern, built mostly in the automobile age, this formerly agricultural metropolis […]

The East Hills Mall in Bakersfield, California is the smaller of the two malls serving this central valley city, and is one of California’s most troubled malls. All of the anchor stores–Harris, Gottschalks, and Mervyn’s–in the 415,000 square foot center have shut, and it serves an area of Bakersfield that is impacted heavily by both crime and the housing crisis of the late 2000s.

Coddingtown Mall, in the Sonoma County city of Santa Rosa, is one of the largest and oldest malls north of San Francisco along the California coast. Unfortunately it seems to be a bit troubled nowadays, but historic mall geeks may find a lot to love. Let’s take a look: Coddingtown Mall opened in 1961 just […]

Browse by state to find photos, histories and discussion about shopping centers throughout the U.S. and Canada., read our coverage of dead malls (the reason most people visit us) or learn why we created Labelscar.

Recent Comments:

J Hyde: Dallas Galleria is not as upscale as it used to be. I haven’t been there in years…but can tell by the...

Craig Nowak: As much as I hate advertising, I have a retail blog of my own and I am trying to bring traffic to it....

June: Does anybody know the names of any of the smaller stores that were in North Hills Mall. I think there was a small 5...

Tara: Pearl Theatres, AT & T, Suglia’s Pizza, and Dunham’s Sports are a few of the stores left. Bath and...

Tara: This mall will be closed soon, and the rumor is that the new owners will be knocking it down. I have photos from...